NFLD
Cabot Tower
Originally uploaded by CarminaGitana. Last week, I came back from St. John's, Newfoundland. Funny, isn't it, after all the prolonged Montreal-centred madness, my first trip in YEARS to Canada was to a place I'd barely heard of before last spring?
I'm blogging quite haphazardly about this - mostly, I just don't want this to be lost to the ether (although there's paper record as well; and more explicit at that). So I'm not sure what details to relate here. Also, it's the same feeling that accompanies any attempt to describe falling in love while you are falling in love - nothing seems adequate, even the fanciest turn of phrase rings hollow, muted and artificial.
Trite as it sounds, it felt like a magical place. For years, I'd been joking that I no longer have a soul, that I'd lost it in law school. I think I got a little of it back in Newfoundland. Something about the air on Signal Hill, I guess, it's sunny clarity; or the way the ocean curls and slams into the scarred cliffs and sends fountains of foam up 10 feet high; or trying to keep up with the speed of a flying fiddle on the dance floor of a crowded pub. Or laughing with strangers, or looking into a person's eyes, expecting to find some sort of barrier, some sort of frontage or bullshit, and finding only openness.
I have never seen so much uncultivated beauty, so much unassuming power, so much dormant, unexploited history. I have never been so moved, or drawn so much joy from a place. Never, not even in France.
And it was a little frightening, how perfectly, how seamlessly my fantasies came to life. The music . . . my God, the music . . . it was everywhere, it was as though the tracks of my CDs had suddenly sprouted human bodies. A little confusing, actually, when you are trying to reconcile the normal-seeming man you are talking to with the demi-god whose lyrics you'd come to worship.
So I suppose that's why I am blogging about this after all, lack of details and all. I've fallen in love. Like a schoolgirl, moony and distracted and given to sudden swings between euphoria and despair. And falling in love is a big thing in a girl's life. Something very bloggable, I think.